Road of the Dead

by Kevin Brooks

  “Something like that.”

  “Do you think it’ll help?”

  He shrugged. “I just want to know how it feels.”

  We walked on in silence to the bus station. It was late afternoon now. The sky was clear and the sun was still fairly bright, but as we entered the bus station everything suddenly faded to a cold, gloomy gray. It was a miserable place, dull and ugly and airless. A world without smiles.

  It was a bus station.

  I checked out the timetables. The next bus to Lychcombe was leaving in half an hour, which wasn’t bad at all, considering the one before that had left five hours ago.

  We went into the station café. Cole got me a couple of meat pies and a Coke, and a coffee for himself, and we took them over to a table by the window. We sat there in silence for a while—Cole sipping his coffee, me munching my way through mouthfuls of moist pastry and gristle—both of us staring idly through the grease-smeared glass of the window. There wasn’t much to look at. Concrete pillars. Metal benches. Broken vending machines. Buses were lurching and rumbling around the concourse, hissing and juddering into their parking bays, and lifeless people were shuffling around looking lost, or bored, or both.

  It was a dead place.

  Dead and cold.

  I looked at Cole. His eyes were still, staring at nothing.

  “I’ve been thinking about Rachel’s raincoat,” I said to him.

  “What?”

  “Rachel’s raincoat.”

  He looked at me. “What about it?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s just that Merton told us they’d found the bus ticket in her raincoat pocket, and Pomeroy said something about her raincoat as well.”

  “So?”

  “Rachel didn’t have a raincoat.”

  “What?”

  “She didn’t have a raincoat.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “How do you know she didn’t have a raincoat?”

  “I don’t know…I just know. I never saw her wearing one. The only coats she ever wore were those little zippyup things. She wasn’t the raincoat type. Think about it, Cole. Can you see Rachel in a raincoat of any kind?”

  He thought about it, closing his eyes, trying to picture her…

  “Believe me,” I said, putting him out of his misery. “She didn’t have a raincoat.”

  “Maybe she bought one,” he suggested. “It was raining that night. Maybe she bought a raincoat—”

  “Or borrowed one.”

  I was looking out through the window as I spoke, my eyes suddenly transfixed. I was staring at Rachel’s ghost. She was there. I could see her. She was right there— sitting on a bus station bench, surrounded by shopping bags, reading a glossy magazine.

  I knew it wasn’t a ghost, and I knew it wasn’t Rachel, but for a fleeting moment my head was ablaze with delusion—It’s a mistake…she’s not dead…it was all a mistake…it was somebody else it was somebody else…

  “Ruben?”

  It wasn’t a mistake.

  “Rube?”

  I turned to Cole. “Yeah…?”

  “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “I asked you who Rachel could have borrowed a raincoat from.”

  “From her,” I said, nodding through the window at the girl who wasn’t a ghost. “From Abbie Gorman.”

  We left the café and headed over to the bench where Abbie was sitting. She was wearing low-slung jeans and a tight black sweater, and her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses.

  “Are you sure that’s her?” Cole asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  Her resemblance to Rachel unsettled him. I could see the unease in his eyes, and I could feel him struggling with the pictures she stirred in the core in his mind.

  The pictures of Rachel.

  I could see them, too.

  As we walked up to the bench and stopped in front of it, Abbie lowered her magazine and looked up at us over her sunglasses.

  “Excuse me,” Cole said. “I hope you don’t mind—”

  “What?” she said sharply. “What do you want?”

  “Are you Abbie Gorman?”

  Her eyes flashed with fear. “Why? Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I’m Cole Ford, this is Ruben. We’re Rachel’s brothers.”

  Abbie’s mouth dropped open and she stared at us. The immediate fear had gone from her eyes, but there was something else there now, something deeper. I didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t feel good.

  “You’re Cole?” she said.

  Cole nodded.

  She looked at me, her eyes widening in recognition. “Ruben? Christ…look at you. Last time I saw you, you were just a little kid.” She shook her head in amazement. “God, you scared me. I didn’t know who you were. I thought you were after money or something.” She looked back at Cole again, beginning to smile. “What are you doing here?” And then her face suddenly died. “Oh God, Rachel…God, I’m so sorry…”

  And she started crying.

  Cole isn’t very comfortable with tears. Me neither, actually. We don’t really know what to do with them. Especially when we’re standing around in an unfamiliar bus station and people are beginning to stop and stare and wonder what’s going on.

  So we were both pretty relieved when the bus to Lychcombe pulled in and Abbie started pulling herself together.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes and collecting her bags. “I really have to go. This is the last bus back. I’d love to stay and talk to you—”

  “We can talk on the bus,” said Cole.

  “Sorry?”

  “We’re going to Lychcombe.”

  Abbie froze. “You’re what?”

  “We’re going to Lychcombe,” Cole repeated. “You don’t mind if we join you on the bus, do you?”

  “No,” she said, lying through her teeth. “No, not at all.”

  My dad used to travel all over the place before he married Mum. He spent most of his life on the road—working here, working there, doing this and that. He never cared what he did for money. Like most gypsies, he didn’t live to work, he worked to live. He could turn his hand to just about anything—farmwork, tarmacking, roofing, laboring. He even sold carpets for a while. Sometimes he’d go off somewhere and work on his own, but most of the time he traveled around with his family and a tight-knit group of other families, often closely related. They’d set up camp on the edge of a town somewhere, work the land or the streets for a few months, then move on again and try somewhere new. During the summer they’d spend most of their time—and most of their money—at fairs and horse races all over the country: Appleby, Doncaster, Derby, Musselburgh. Dad used to fight at the races, too. Big fights, big crowds, big money.

  His life was so bound up with being on the move that when he first started living at the breaker’s yard with Mum, he was physically ill for a while. He just wasn’t used to staying in one place. He tried to pretend that it wasn’t a problem—“Being a gypsy is a state of mind,” he used to say, “not a state of action”—but he never really got over it.

  Anyway, I suppose what I’m trying to say is that although I’m half gypsy, and although there’s a big part of my dad in me, I haven’t really traveled at all. In my mind I’ve been around the world and back—in stories, in dreams, in thoughts—but in reality I’ve hardly been anywhere outside London. It’s never really bothered me that much. I mean, I’ve never pined for the open roads or anything. But as the bus rattled out of Plymouth that day and we headed up onto the moor, I began to realize that maybe I had been missing out on something after all.

  After the bus had pulled out of the station and we’d all settled down in our seats, the three of us had spent the first five minutes of the journey just staring through the windows in awkward silence. None of us knew what to say. I was sitting on the long backseat behind Cole, and Abbie was sitting across from him. She’d piled all her shoppin
g bags on the seat beside her, as if she didn’t want either of us to get too close.

  There wasn’t much to see through the windows at first. Everything looked the same as everywhere else. Only grayer. And uglier. Same shops, same streets, same faces, same traffic. There weren’t even any other passengers to look at. The bus was empty. Just us, the driver, and our awkward silence.

  Gradually, though, as the gray of the town gave way to the rolling pastures of the countryside, Cole and Abbie began to talk. It was all very hesitant at first—forced and wary, hard work for both of them—but at least they were talking. I listened for a while, but it was mostly nothing stuff—the kind of stuff you talk about before you start talking about the stuff you really want to talk about—so I just let them get on with it and turned my attention to the alien world passing by outside.

  It was stunning.

  I’d read books about Dartmoor, of course, especially over the last few days, but books are no substitute for the real thing—and the real thing was just incredible. I’d never seen such emptiness.

  We’d left the lush green fields behind us now and were heading up into the heart of the moor. The road was narrowing, growing bleaker and wilder as it stretched out in front of us over huge rolling slopes, and in the distance the landscape was darkening in the shadows of sinister hills. The moorland skies were gray and endless, and the air was getting colder by the minute. Everything looked faded and dead: the bone-white grasses at the side of the road, the giant boulders dotted over the slopes, the pale hills in the background. The emptiness went on forever. There were no houses, no cars, no shops, no people, no nothing. Just a lonely gray road, leading to nowhere.

  In the distance, dark forests loomed against the horizon. On the high ground between the forests, towering outcrops of weirdly shaped rocks jutted out from the ground, and in the slanting rays of the early evening sun, the silhouettes of the weathered rocks formed nightmare faces against the sky: humans, dogs, giants, demons. Around the rocks there were strange stunted trees, their withered branches sculpted by the wind.

  The trees spoke to me of dying breaths.

  My heart was cold.

  “They’re tors,” Abbie said, breaking into my thoughts.

  “What?”

  “Those rocks in the distance—they’re called tors.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I know.”

  She looked at me, and I immediately regretted the tone of my voice. I hadn’t meant to sound rude, it’d just come out that way. I smiled at her, trying to make up for it.

  “I remember reading something about them,” I said awkwardly. “The tors, I mean. They’re formed out of ancient granite that’s been chemically eroded over millions of years…”

  “Really?”

  I nodded. She was staring at me now, and I should have shut up. But I was embarrassed, and when I’m embarrassed I can’t shut up. My brain gets scrambled and I start jabbering like an idiot. “Sorry,” I muttered, “I expect you already knew that, didn’t you? About the tors, I mean. Not that it matters…I mean, it doesn’t matter if you knew it or not…I just meant, you know…I didn’t mean anything…”

  Abbie had turned to Cole now, looking at him with her eyebrows raised as if I was out of my head.

  Cole just shrugged.

  Abbie glanced back at me again. I looked at Cole. He gave me a meaningful look.

  I nodded at him, smiled at Abbie again, then went back to looking out of the window.

  I wasn’t sure what Cole’s meaningful look was supposed to mean, but I guessed he wanted me to shut up and listen.

  So that’s what I did.

  As the bus carried on rattling across the moor, and the landscape grew colder and grayer, I shut up and listened.

  Cole and Abbie were talking seriously now—talking about the things they really wanted to talk about. I listened as Abbie asked Cole what we were doing here, and Cole carefully avoided telling her. I listened as she asked him how Mum was doing, and he replied with a few mumbled nothings. I listened as he asked her about Rachel, and she told him how devastated she was, how sickened, how hurt. How heartbroken.

  She wasn’t lying. I could feel her pain. I could hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes. Her feelings for Rachel were genuine. No, she wasn’t lying. But she wasn’t telling the truth, either.

  “Could you tell us what happened?” Cole asked her.

  She looked at him. “Didn’t the police tell you?”

  “Yeah, but you were here, weren’t you? You know how it was.”

  Her eyes blinked hesitantly.

  Cole said, “It’d really help us to hear it from you. I know it’s difficult…”

  “I wasn’t actually there,” she said. “Not when it happened.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I was at my mother-in-law’s house.” She paused, thinking about it, then she took a deep breath and began to explain. “Earlier that evening, I’d walked down to the village with Rachel and we’d had a quick drink in the pub. She was getting the last bus back to Plymouth. It leaves at eight-thirty.”

  “What time did you leave your house?” Cole asked her.

  “About quarter to seven. The village isn’t far away…about twenty minutes’ walk. Maybe half an hour. It was just starting to rain when we got there. I remember stopping outside the pub and looking up at the sky and seeing these huge black rain clouds rolling toward us across the moor. I tried telling Rach then that she should stay another night and go back in the morning, but she wouldn’t listen. When I told her there was a really bad storm coming, she just shrugged and said, ‘Let it come.’”

  I looked at Cole. He didn’t show anything, but I knew what he was thinking. “Let it come” is something that Dad often says. Whenever there’s something bad on the horizon, he just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Let it come. Just let it come.”

  “Anyway,” Abbie continued, “we went into the pub and had a couple of drinks, and while we were in there the storm started to break.” She shook her head. “God, it was unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it. The skies just opened up and the rain came down in buckets. It was like a monsoon or something.” She looked out the bus window. “All this was flooded. The road, the moor, everything. Look…” She pointed to the side of the road. “You can still see all the stuff that got washed down from the moor.”

  I looked out the window. The edge of the road was littered with flood debris—dried mud, leaves, twigs.

  Abbie shook her head again. “I told Rachel she couldn’t go back in the storm. I told her. I said I’d call Vince and get him to pick us up before it got too bad, but she just wouldn’t have it. She said she wanted to go home.” Abbie looked at Cole, then at me. “She said she missed her family.”

  Cole closed his eyes for a moment. I didn’t close mine, because I knew if I did I’d start crying.

  Cole said, “Who’s Vince?”

  “My husband.”

  Cole nodded. “But Rachel wouldn’t let you call him?”

  “No. She wouldn’t even let me walk with her to the bus stop. ‘There’s no point in both of us getting soaked, is there?’ she said.”

  “What time did she leave the pub?” Cole asked.

  “About eight.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. I stayed in the pub for a while, then I went around to visit my mother-in-law. She lives in the street behind the pub.”

  “And that was the last time you saw Rachel—when she left the pub?”

  Abbie nodded. “I found out later that the bus was about an hour late because of the storm, but she definitely got on it. The driver remembers her. But the bus never got to Plymouth. It had to stop…” She leaned to one side and pointed through the windscreen at the road up ahead. “It was just over there. See that steep little bank at the end of the road?”

  We both looked out the window. About half a mile ahead, the road dipped down and veered off to the right under a steep bank of trees. As we got closer, we cou
ld see where the bank had collapsed. Piles of red earth and fallen trees had been bulldozed off the road.

  “The road was blocked,” Abbie said. “Nothing could get through. The bus had to turn around and come back. It was getting pretty late by then, and the road was getting really bad, so by the time the bus got back to Lychcombe it was gone eleven o’clock. The driver remembers Rachel getting off. He asked her if she was going to be all right. She told him not to worry, she had some friends in the village and she’d stay the night with them.”

  “But she never showed up,” said Cole.

  “No…we just assumed she’d caught the train and gone home. We didn’t know anything was wrong until the next day.”

  “Why didn’t she call you?”

  “The phone box by the bus stop was out of order.”

  “She had her cell.”

  Abbie shook her head. “You can’t get a signal around here. The police think she probably tried calling us from the phone box, then when she couldn’t get through she decided to walk to our house…”

  Her voice trailed off and she lowered her eyes, unwilling to go any further. But Cole didn’t seem to notice. Either that, or he just didn’t care.

  “So that’s when it happened,” he said. “Somewhere between the bus stop and your place…someone took her.”

  Abbie nodded silently.

  “Where were you then?” asked Cole.

  Abbie looked up suddenly. “What?”

  “Where were you when Rachel was walking back to your place?”

  “I just told you—”

  “Were you still at your mother-in-law’s?”

  Her eyes were getting angry now. “Why are you asking me—?”

  “What time did you leave?”

  She glared at Cole in disbelief. “You don’t have any right to question me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was her friend, for God’s sake. If you think—”

  “I don’t think anything,” Cole said calmly. “I just want to know what happened to Rachel. The more you tell me the more I’ll know.”

  Abbie continued staring at him for a while, but I could see her anger fading.

  “Yeah, well…” she muttered eventually. “I can’t tell you any more, can I? I don’t know any more. I wish I did, but I don’t.”